As I’ve said previously, Elon Musk is a troll. He’s not a strategist or a long term thinker with original ideas even if he has convinced people that he is, buit he sure knows how to push buttons and exploit people. In that way, he is very much like his buddy, Vladimir Putin. I would like to imagine the two of them sharing a drink together…out of a bucket of dank water deep in the bowels of some prison-dungeon, answering for their crimes against humanity, but I think we all know how unlikely that is because regardless of how you believe the “arc of justice bends”, it usually misses the worst offenders.
My eleven year old nephew was doing a report about SpaceX. His comment was “SpaceX is difficult ‘cause the jiz gets all over the spaceship.” My sister of course got a startled phone call from the teacher.
This is what i believe. I think some combination of being too rich to care and using drugs has addled his brain.
But i also think his gamble on Twitter paid off. (Even if he stumbled into it.) He’s going to rake it in during this administration he helped to create.
There is a thread about Space X and related stuff, and some members of this board have shown to my surprise they are real Musk fans. To go any deeper this thread would have to be in the Pit. Suffice to say that I can’t see neither a bright nor a long future for Mr. Musk, but he has proven me wrong before. It may be me who lacks imagination.
It is also usually an anti-social skill that funnels wealth and power up to a few people who do not do anything like the work commensurate with their “reward,” which is more like “plunder” than a justified reward. It is a bit like having Elon Musk at the end of the fire bucket brigade: dozens fill and pass on the bucket, but through chance he’s the one who throws the water on the fire, and then takes all the credit for extinguishing the blaze.
There’s going to be another launch tonight at 8:20pm PST from Vandenberg. It feels like an earthquake when it goes overhead in Santa Barbara. You can barely see some of the launches and some put on a beautiful show.
Elon is in a fight with the Coastal Commission over the number of launches allowed per year. Obviously he wants more.
At least this launch won’t have the booster flying back for a landing at Vandenberg like the one last week. Those are the flights with the really obnoxious sonic booms.
Which is why he was so furious when his plan to rescue the children trapped in the cave was shown to be unworkable that he called the diver who actually saved them a pedophile. He didn’t get to be the “hero”.
God, I can’t believe that was only six years ago.
I’ve been seeing a ton of pro-Musk posts all over Facebook over the past year (which is largely why I’ve stopped using that service). I figure his PR team is working overtime to rehabilitate his image.
Get used to it; Vandenberg as limited those flights due to noise pollution, range safety, and overflight concerns but I virtually guarantee that 30SWS is going to get overruled on those issues, at least as long as Musk continues to curry favor.
Along with my hopes and dreams, such as they still remain at present.
Fortunately, as a guy with a tendency to like loud things, this is the least of my concerns about what’s coming. Also helps that unlike the Nextdoor crowd, I immediately recognize the sound for what it is, instead of assuming an east side - west side gang war involving large bombs and IEDs.
If SpaceX’s Starship works out– and it’s gone from a pipe dream to a serious possibility– it will drop the cost of launch even over Falcon 9 as much as Falcon 9 did over previous rockets. Even if round trips to the Moon/Mars never materialize it will revolutionize space flight. I don’t know what technical challenges orbital refueling faces but we’ve known since forever that it’s a technology that must be mastered if humanity is to ever do anything really significant in space; we can’t launch everything in complete packages from Earth. I think if it can be done SpaceX will figure out how to do it; at this point they have resources and expertise comparable to a national space program, I don’t think anyone else could do better.
Seeking to colonize Mars is audacious, but someone needs to try. Sustaining people indefinitely in artificial closed environments is doubtless a huge challenge and one we have very little experience in, but the advantage of Mars is that it does have externals to work with: sources of water ice, an atmosphere that can be processed to obtain oxygen. The Mars settlers by design would not be relying 100% on canned air, water brought from Earth. Not easy at all and I could see the first base camp attempt having to be abandoned after unknown unknowns turn up. But someone ought to try.
No, quite a few people in quite a few areas are brilliant innovators in their youth but become hidebound or eccentric in their old age. I think neurological decay in old age is quite prevalent even in people who aren’t not obviously senile. Many people lose as much as half of their mental capacity and retreat into coping strategies.
I don’t think Musk has much influence on how the company is run, anyway. He seems to be especially preoccupied now with manipulating Donald Trump.
Musk is effectively a Bond villain now, a man with so much money and power that he’s trying to replace representative government, a man who, for the good of humanity, needs to be stopped. His little influence on SpaceX should be the least of anyone’s concerns.
Twitter sure can wreck a brain. Mostly younger brains, but Musk was already emotionally stunted.
I met him at a house party at Queen’s University. It was… 1991? 1992? Something like that, he and I are the same age. Might have talked to him for three minutes. He seemed like a dickhead even then, but I guess I should have befriended him.
The problem is that those of us who love technology and space travel want SpaceX to succeed from that perspective, but its success also makes Elmo richer and more dangerous than ever. It’s an uncomfortable dichotomy, which is the basis of the OP’s complaint.
Well, of course we already have that. Relatively fast, low-latency internet is available wherever there is cellular service.
Ships have internet access, and so do research stations in Antarctica. Those types of satellite channels do suffer from high latency, but for most applications it’s either a minor inconvenience or, more often, totally doesn’t matter.
I really liked A City on Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith for an in-depth look at just how implausible settling Mars, or any habitat in space, is given current and foreseeable technology. It just isn’t an option at this point.
